Sunday, December 4, 2011

‘I’ll have that’: Five reprint wishes

Even though we are living in a real Golden
Age of comic book reprints – where it’s possible to get almost anything in some
kind of collected form – there are still books that I would get without
hesitation, if they only existed in the first place.

Not many people might buy these five
collections if they were actually published, but I would.

***

Ann
Nocenti and Sean Phillips’ Kid Eternity

I’ve been on an Ann Nocenti kick in recent
weeks – enjoying both her writing and editing work. I was delighted to see she
was returning to monthly comics with Green Arrow and I’ll probably buy that for
a while, based purely on goodwill stretching back to those remarkable issues of
Daredevil she did.

One of the last things she wrote for comics
before shifting her focus to journalism, Kid Eternity has Nocenti’s typical
stream of consciousness joy, with Sean Phillips actually let off the leash for
once. His art is still a little too stilted for the askew stories, but he shows
an imaginative flair in design that he barely gets to use in more earthly
concerns like Criminal.

Kid Eternity was also one of the first
Vertigo comics, helping to set a vague template for insane, road tripping sagas
that the imprint has returned to, again and again. It was also a sequel to
Grant Morrison’s aggressively obtuse mini-series, and while it shared that
shorter series’ warped sense of humour, it also carved its own path into the
American headspace, taking the road of beat poets and crazed psychoanalysts.

Entire runs of Vertigo comics like Sandman,
Preacher, Fables, Lucifer, and The Inivisbles have all been collected and are
easily available, but of the uncollected Vertigo comics (and there really are a
lot of them), Kid Eternity is one I’d like to see the most. It didn’t last long
into its second year, and one, good chunky reprint could take care of the lot.
With Nocenti coming back to Green Arrow, and Phillips still doing wonderful
things with Ed Brubaker, there may not be a better time to find an audience for
this.

Somebody borrowed all my Kid Eternity
comics more than ten years ago and never gave them back, and they’re not as plentiful
in the $1 bins as they once were, so any kind of book featuring these odd
little comics would find a home on my shelf.

***

The
Amazing World of DC Comics

I keep seeing the covers for these things
in copies of Back Issue magazine, but I’ve never seen one in the real world. An
in-house fanzine that offered unprecedented looks at the production and
construction of DC comics in the 1970s, issues of The Amazing World of DC now
look like brilliantly interesting slices of history.

At least, I hope they offer fascinating
insights, but like I said, I’ve never even seen one. But friendly interviews
with people like Joe Kubert and Carmine Infantino at the very height of their
powers, and glimpses behind the office doors of DC Comics, and passionate (if
biased) appreciations of DC’s past, are all guaranteed.

I mean, just look at these covers.

How could anybody with the slightest interest
in DC comics not want to see what lurks beneath these covers?

While we’re at it, it would also be bloody
wonderful if the FOOM magazines were collected too. Same thing, different
company….

***

Charley’s
War omnibus

Charley’s War - the absolutely brilliant
World War One comic by the great Pat Mills and the greater Joe Colquon – is
already available in nice big hardcovers, but I would give anything to own it
in chunky, pulpy volumes.

It’s a proper saga that never loses sight
of its humanitarian roots, sprawling all over the War’s grim conflicts, taking
in many of the key battles that carved out history, at the tragic cost of tens
of thousands of lives. And while it is immensely satisfying in short, sharp
doses, it also works incredibly well as one big, long and terrible tale.

The Great War was a gigantic and horrific
meat grinder, as soldiers marched into machine gun fire. A larger collection
would pile the horror up higher and higher and add to the intensity. Charley
Bourne’s story is a long and terrible one, but it also says multitudes about
things like honour, class treachery, survival and compassion.

It would also balance out the story a bit
more. Each of the hardcover books covers a huge amount of ground, but one
volume –which might only deal with one battle in that vast conflict - can be
unrelentingly grim, and it can be a long, long wait until the next volume,
which offers a little blue sky of peace in the thunderstorm of war.

I’ve already got a lot of it when it a
large amount was reprinted in the Judge Dredd Megazine, but it stretches well
past that (and even past the official end of WW1, into the forgotten British
incursion into Russia), and even though it really finishes when Mills stopped
writing the title, there is merit in Charley’s curtailed World War Two
adventure. (Scott Goodall is no Pat Mills, but who is?). That could all be
collected in a few mammoth Omnibus-style books.

Besides, each of those hardcovers costs
upwards of 70 bucks these days, and, as ever, that’s just too much to ask for
that much comic.

***

The
essays from the back of Criminal

Oh c’mon, man. Criminal just reads a whole
lot better in book form, and we all know it, but don’t deny us all those
fascinating essays by guys like Brubaker, Aaron, Grant, Stradford and Nevinsthat bulk out each new monthly
issue. I know they’re supposed to encourage people to go monthly, but I’m in a
nice little habit of getting the books, I just want to read those essays.

***

Legion
v4

I had a dream about the Legion of Super-Heroes
last night. In it, I was reading a comic about their adventures in the 41st
century, and then I was in the comic, using my flight ring to help Ultra Legend
and his ghost kids take down Brainiac 27 high above the ruined surface of Takron-Galtos.

It was over before it started, but it was
fucking awesome while it lasted.

It wasn’t the first time this happened - I
had an insane, shroom-related waking dream involving Luornu
Durgo in the late nineties, and I once dreamt that Timber Wolf was
on the roof of my house. (Sometimes I think he really was. Sometimes I think he
still is.)

All of my long and sad obsession with the
Legion of Super Heroes goes back to issue number twenty of volume four. I
haven’t followed the Legion on a monthly basis since 1998, but I still rate the
issues by Keith Giffen and the Bierbums as highly as any other period in the
Legion’s convoluted history.

I was recently sorting out how much Legion
of Super-Heroes I really needed (a lot of the Jeff Moy chunky Barbie books were
the first to go,) so I’ve had the Legion on the brain recently, which explains
that vivid dream. There is a distinct possibility that it’s also all Colin’s
fault again. But once I get Legion on my mind, I always find myself gravitating
back to those Giffen/Bierbaum issues, because they are
always my favourites.

They’re clumsy and clunky stories, beaten
up and left for dead in a dark alley by DC’s editorial direction, with
good-natured character nurturing that occasionally went over the line into
bizarre perversion (poor old Proty). Giffen’s cragtastic scowls and extreme
close-ups melded with the Bierbaum’s naturalistic dialogue and stories that
were both narrtively baffling and utterly confusing on a panel-to-panel level.

I’ve always thought this was a good thing, and
have always been richly rewarded every time I’ve gone back to these comics,
finding new references and in-jokes, making new emotional connections. For a
long, long time, I just assumed everybody who ever read this version of the
Legion enjoyed that same blunt complexity, but I have since realised that it’s
really not for everyone.

While I used to be genuinely baffled by the
lack of any collection of the Giffen/Bierbum, I now realise that the things I
enjoyed most about Legion – its confusion and refusal to make it easy for the
reader – were the things that put most people off it. Most people just don’t
want to put that much time and effort into a superhero comic, especially a
20-year-old comic that has zero impact on the current DC universe.

I’m sure that one day, somebody will
reprint all these comics. If we’re really lucky, they might do a black and
white Showcase, and make it all even more confusing. DC will probably sell
about thirty books.

1 comment:

David Rees
said...

Glaringly obvious things lacking any reprints: Pretty much any Milligan & McCarthy you care to mention: Skin, Rogan Josh, Sooner or Later, Paradax... At least we're getting a new McCarthy strip in the Prog next year.